Mixing the Ultimate Lead Vocal, Part 3

Over the past couple of months in these
pages, I’ve outlined sundry tools and
techniques that excel at bridling dynamics
and sculpting mondo tone for lead
vocal tracks. This month, we’ll tickle
the troubadour’s track with automatic
double-tracking (ADT) effects and reverb.
Put these best practices to work on your
money track.

Double Up Celemony Melodyne Editor
and Antares Auto-Tune can each produce
fat ADT effects, creating the illusion that
the singer sang the same melody twice
for simultaneous playback. Make a copy
of your lead vocal track and tune it, using
either plug-in. (Auto-Tune’s automatic
mode will yield the fastest results, if
you’re in a hurry.) Then play both the
tuned and untuned tracks together at
mixdown. In most cases, the result will
sound clearer and more natural and
dynamic than a chorus effect fashioned
from a modulating delay.

Reverb plug-ins can also be used to
create ginormous-sounding ADT effects.
The Softube TSAR-1, 2CAudio Aether,
and Lexicon LXP Reverb Bundle all allow
you to mute the reverb’s tail (a.k.a. late
reflections), leaving only early reflections
that double up vocals magnificently.

If your reverb plug-in can’t completely
kill late reflections, try this alternative
strategy: Reduce the reverb’s decay time
to less than 0.2 seconds. Set the size
parameter fairly high and the diffusion
control (if available) very low. You’ll know
the size parameter is set too high if you
hear a significant delay between the dry
track voicing and the onset of discrete
echoes; if it’s set too low, the effect will
sound too subtle. Also make sure your
pre-delay setting is very short (no more
than 10ms) or off. Blend the 100%-wet
output of the plug-in with your dry track
to taste. Voilà, your singer sounds huge!
The inexpensive and user-friendly
2CAudio Breeze plug-in sounds fantastic
using the above-detailed settings (see
Figure 1 above).

Push Back Your Reverb Of course,
there are times when you want to hear a
reverb tail on the lead vocal track. In this
case, it’s often a good idea to program at
least several milliseconds of pre-delay for
your reverb patch.

Pre-delay typically refers to how
long (after dry input) it takes for early
reflections to begin to voice. (The TSAR-1
implements pre-delay differently from
other plug-ins.) A little bit of pre-delay
gives the dry track a chance to voice
without being veiled by reverb, thereby
improving clarity and intelligibility. It also
increases the apparent size of a virtual
space: For every millisecond of pre-delay
you’ve dialed in, your brain interprets
the nearest reflective boundary to be roughly
six inches away. You can bounce your lead
vocal off a virtual canyon wall roughly 200 feet
away, for example, by setting pre-delay on your
reverb to 400ms.

But before you go Pink Floyd on me,
consider this: If pre-delay is set higher than
40ms, you’ll hear discrete echoes when the
early reflections voice. If the onset of those
echoes doesn’t occur on a beat or subdivision
beat of your music’s groove, it’ll throw a
wrench into the rhythmic feel of the song.
Luckily, the Lexicon PCM Native Reverb
Bundle allows you to easily synchronize predelay
time to your host DAW’s tempo, using
any of 13 different note values ranging from a
32nd to a half-note. All of the bundle’s seven
different reverb plug-ins also allow you to
tempo-sync—to a different note value—the
delay time that separates early reflections
from the onset of the reverb tail that follows.

Break Out the Calculator If your plug-in
can’t sync early and late reflections to your
DAW’s tempo, you can calculate the necessary
delay times needed for each and enter them
manually, as long as your reverb plug-in allows
editing those parameters. (This is only feasible
for fixed-tempo recordings.) First, divide your
song’s tempo by 60 to arrive at the number
of beats per second. (For example, 120BPM
divided by 60 equals 2 beats per second.) Next,
divide 1,000ms by your result (e.g., 1,000/2 =
500) to arrive at the number of milliseconds
one beat—or a quarter-note delay—takes at
your song’s tempo. Using this formula in a song
that has a 120BPM tempo, we can program
500ms pre-delay time to make early reflections
arrive a quarter-note’s duration after dry signal
voices. An eighth-note pre-delay would need
half as much time or 250ms, a sixteenth-note
pre-delay 125ms, quarter-note triplets 166.7ms
(500ms divided by 3), and so on.

Go Beyond Reverbs Some productions—
for example, those with very dense
arrangements—don’t take kindly to slathering
’verb on the lead vocal track; it just makes the
singing sound veiled or ghosty. Next month, I’ll
show you how to use echo and multi-tap delay
to add depth and ambience where reverb fears
to tread. I’ll also reveal some hot tricks using
other types of processors to give your vocal
track its moment in the sun.